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100-523: The damp earth produced me from her cold womb; I am not made from the rasping fleece of wool, no leashes pull [me] nor garrulous threads reverberate, nor do Oriental worms weave [me] with yellow down, nor am I plucked by shuttles nor beaten by the hard reed; and yet I will be called a coat in the common speech. I do not fear arrows pulled out from long quivers. The Leiden Riddle is attested in MS Leiden VLQ 106, Leiden University Library , where it accompanies

200-401: A completely unknown writing system in 19th-century Assyriology . It was successfully deciphered by 1857. The cuneiform script changed considerably over more than 2,000 years. The image below shows the development of the sign SAĜ "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕 ). Stages: The cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from

300-815: A distinct pronunciation are the Leiden forms ueta (1), herum (4) and auefun (9), whose ⟨e⟩ versus Exeter ⟨æ⟩ represents one of the most important dialect divisions between West Saxon and Anglian ; similarly significant are the vowels in, e.g., Leiden heh (4) rather than heah , uarp (5) as opposed to wearp , biað (5) next to beoð , and so on. In general, there is a far greater range of unaccented vowels in Leiden, another feature of an early date (before these merged; compare, e.g., innaðae (2) with innaðe , hlimmith (6) with hlimmeð ); and some important differences in inflexional endings (viz. Leiden's early preterite plural auefun (9), Exeter's late awæfan ). Leiden University Library Leiden University Libraries

400-550: A given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological . Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at about that time, labeled the Early Bronze Age II epoch by historians. The earliest known Sumerian king, whose name appears on contemporary cuneiform tablets,

500-577: A language structure typical of the non-Indo-European agglutinative Sumerian language . The first tablets using syllabic elements date to the Early Dynastic I–II periods c.  2800 BC , and they are agreed to be clearly in Sumerian. This is the time when some pictographic element started to be used for their phonetic value, permitting the recording of abstract ideas or personal names. Many pictographs began to lose their original function, and

600-948: A new floor on top of the University Library. In 2017, the Academic Historical Museum became part of UBL. The library of The Netherlands Institute for the Near East , specialised in the fields of Assyriology , Egyptology and Near Eastern Archaeology , became part of UBL in 2018. In 2021, the Walaeus Library of the Leiden University Medical Center joined UBL. In 2024 a new Science Library, African Library and Middle Eastern Library were opened. Leiden University Libraries works together with other organizations nationally and internationally on innovation projects in this area. The library e.g. participated in

700-641: A phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of logographic and phonemic writing. Elamite cuneiform was a simplified form of the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, used to write the Elamite language in the area that corresponds to modern Iran from the 3rd millennium BC to the 4th century BC. Elamite cuneiform at times competed with other local scripts, Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite . The earliest known Elamite cuneiform text

800-432: A pointed stylus, sometimes called "linear cuneiform". Many of the early dynastic inscriptions, particularly those made on stone, continued to use the linear style as late as circa 2000 BC. In the mid-3rd millennium BC, a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped cuneiform. This development made writing quicker and easier, especially when writing on soft clay. By adjusting

900-477: A resemblance to Old Japanese , written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters. This "mixed" method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when "purism" was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with

1000-608: A richly illustrated magazine in Dutch for lovers of books with information about the early and modern book and graphic art. The collection Western Manuscripts contains all western manuscripts (including 2,500 medieval manuscripts and fragments and 25,000 modern manuscripts), 300,000 letters, archives and 3,000 annotated prints of the University Library, including the archives of the university. The collection Western Printed Works contains materials printed before 1801 (including 700 incunabula ) and rare and precious works from after 1801. In

1100-548: A sharpened reed stylus or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes. Most Proto-Cuneiform records from this period were of an accounting nature. The proto-cuneiform sign list has grown, as new texts are discovered, and shrunk, as variant signs are combined. The current sign list is 705 elements long with 42 being numeric and four considered pre-proto-Elamite. Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinatives and were

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1200-700: A similar society for the study of scientific subjects founded in Haarlem in 1752. Both societies still hold contests and award prizes for achievement. Founded in 1822, the Print Room possesses art works from the sixteenth century until the present day. Whether you are interested in mythological scenes from the Italian Renaissance , daguerreotypes , the largest collection of portraits in the Netherlands, stereophotography or Dutch landscapes by Rembrandt and his pupils,

1300-559: A slightly different way. From the 6th century, the Akkadian language was marginalized by Aramaic , written in the Aramaic alphabet , but Akkadian cuneiform remained in use in the literary tradition well into the times of the Parthian Empire (250 BC–226 AD). The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD. The ability to read cuneiform may have persisted until

1400-607: A stylus. Writing is first recorded in Uruk , at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near-East . An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing : Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay. The cuneiform writing system

1500-428: Is Enmebaragesi of Kish (fl. c.  2600 BC ). Surviving records became less fragmentary for following reigns and by the arrival of Sargon, it had become standard practice for each major city-state to date documents by year-names, commemorating the exploits of its king. Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script , and, probably, [were] invented under

1600-799: Is a library founded in 1575 in Leiden , Netherlands. It is regarded as a significant place in the development of European culture : it is a part of a small number of cultural centres that gave direction to the development and spread of knowledge during the Enlightenment . This was due particularly to the simultaneous presence of a unique collection of exceptional sources and scholars. Holdings include approximately 5,200,000 volumes, 1,000,000 e-books , 70,000 e-journals , 2,000 current paper journals , 60,000 Oriental and Western manuscripts, 500,000 letters , 100,000 maps, 100,000 prints , 12,000 drawings, 300,000 photographs and 3,000 cuneiform tablets. The library manages

1700-552: Is a treaty between Akkadians and the Elamites that dates back to 2200 BC. Some believe it might have been in use since 2500 BC. The tablets are poorly preserved, so only limited parts can be read, but it is understood that the text is a treaty between the Akkad king Nāramsîn and Elamite ruler Hita , as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy". The most famous Elamite scriptures and

1800-579: Is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of c. 1800 BC to the Hittite language and was used from the 17th until approximately the 13th century BC. More or less the same system was used by the scribes of the Hittite Empire for two other Anatolian languages , namely Luwian (alongside the native Anatolian hieroglyphics ) and Palaic , as well as for the isolate Hattic language . When the cuneiform script

1900-429: Is called gunû or "gunification"; if signs are cross-hatched with additional Winkelhaken , they are called šešig ; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called nutillu . "Typical" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs);

2000-429: Is distinguished by its balanced proportions and the purity of its Ionic order on top of a high basement. The Bibliotheca Thysiana is the only surviving 17th century example in the Netherlands of a building that was designed as a library. It is quite extraordinary that a complete private 17th century library has been preserved and thus offers a good impression of the book collection of a young, learned bibliophile from

2100-464: Is regarded as the base on which the library is built ( fundamentum locans futurae aliquando bibliothecae ). The library became operational in the vault of the current Academy building at Rapenburg on 31 October 1587. In 1595 the Nomenclator appeared, the first catalogue of Leiden University Libraries as well as the first printed catalogue of an institutional library in the world. The publication of

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2200-576: The DAREnet project and in projects financed by the European Union such as DRIVER-II , OAPEN , PAGODE and ARMA. Leiden University Libraries hold a large number of special collections of national and international importance. These include manuscripts, early printed books, maps, atlases, prints, drawings, and photographs. To make these collections visible for a broad audience, the library partnered in 2015 with De Boekenwereld  [ nl ] ,

2300-453: The Iron Age (c. 10th to 6th centuries BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. The characters remained the same as those of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiforms, but the graphic design of each character relied more heavily on wedges and square angles, making them significantly more abstract: Babylonian cuneiform was simplified along similar lines during that period, albeit to a lesser extent and in

2400-574: The Netherlands Antilles ). The collection contains about 1 million – mostly postcolonial – books and special collections, including 150.000 digitized historical photographs, maps, prints and unique archives. On 1 July 2014, the management of the collection was transferred from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences to Leiden University Libraries. 3,000 cuneiform tablets of Sumerian and Babylonian / Assyrian origin,

2500-729: The Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection (approx. 40,000), and Penn Museum . Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published", as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world. The decipherment of cuneiform began with

2600-520: The Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are: Except for the Winkelhaken , which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition. Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. If a sign is modified with additional wedges, this

2700-555: The open access principles. Furthermore, publications from Leiden researchers are increasingly made available through the same repository . Thanks to the use of international standards, among others the Open Archives Initiative , the repository is visited daily by general and specialized search engines that harvest and index this information. In 2007, the library started with an ambitious program to renew and renovate its facilities: wireless access became available throughout

2800-401: The 23rd century BC ( short chronology ). The Akkadian language being East Semitic , its structure was completely different from Sumerian. The Akkadians found a practical solution in writing their language phonetically, using the corresponding Sumerian phonetic signs. Still, many of the Sumerian characters were retained for their logographic value as well: for example the character for "sheep"

2900-408: The 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC . The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite , Elamite , Hurrian , Luwian , and Urartian . The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to

3000-504: The 3rd millennium Sumerian script. Ugaritic was written using the Ugaritic alphabet , a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad ) written using the cuneiform method. Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 –100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (approx. 130,000 tablets), followed by

3100-473: The Akkadian period, at the time of the Uruk ruler Lugalzagesi (r. c. 2294–2270 BC). The vertical style remained for monumental purposes on stone stelas until the middle of the 2nd millennium. Written Sumerian was used as a scribal language until the first century AD. The spoken language died out between about 2100 and 1700 BC. The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from

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3200-491: The Dutch PICA-GGC and resulted within a few years in a catalog on microfiche , which partly replaced the famous Leiden booklets catalogue. In 1983 the library moved to its present location on Witte Singel in a new building by architect Bart van Kasteel. The first online catalogue became available in 1988. According to Nicholas A. Basbanes , Leiden University Libraries represent "an essential benchmark [...] not only for

3300-514: The Exeter Book: The differences between these two copies are ample testament to the distances in time and space that separate them. Several are relatively superficial, representing different conventions for the spelling of what was in fact the same sound: eg. Leiden's typically early ⟨u⟩, ⟨th⟩ and ⟨b⟩, frequently appearing for Exeter ⟨w⟩ (the Anglo-Saxon letter ' wynn '), ⟨þ⟩ and ⟨f⟩. Reflecting

3400-480: The KITLV-Jakarta office where extensive paper and digital collections on modern Indonesia are collected and cataloged. To house its world-famous and vast Asian collections a number of new facilities have been created: an open stack area making 5 km of materials directly available and a new remote storage facility housing 38 km of library materials. On 14 September 2017, Queen Máxima opened The Asian Library,

3500-477: The Latin text on which it is based. The manuscript was described by Herbert Dean Merritt thus: The manuscript was probably copied in western France, perhaps at Fleury Abbey . The riddle was added after the completion of the main contents, fairly certainly at Fleury Abbey , in the tenth century, but the language of the text is older, of the eighth century. It was already hard to read by the earlier nineteenth century, and

3600-478: The Leiden manuscript, the texts are the identical on all but a couple of points. The translation has been praised for its complexity and wit. In the assessment of Thomas Klein, The Leiden Riddle is an unusually archaic example of Old English, and one of relatively few representatives of its Northumbrian dialect . This is easily shown through comparison between the Leiden Riddle and the later, West Saxon copy in

3700-523: The Netherlands and elsewhere who wish to work in Leiden for a longer period. These include the Brill, Elsevier, Lingling Wiyadharma, Van de Sande, Juynboll en Ailion fellowships, which focus on different disciplines or regions. The Scaliger Chair, affiliated with both the Institute at Leiden University Libraries and the university's Faculty of Humanities, is tasked with "promot[ing] teaching and research relating to

3800-542: The Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring Semitic languages , the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Elamite cuneiform appears to have used far fewer signs than its Akkadian prototype and initially relied primarily on syllabograms, but logograms became more common in later texts. Many signs soon acquired highly distinctive local shape variants that are often difficult to recognise as related to their Akkadian prototypes. Hittite cuneiform

3900-582: The Print Room has them. The holdings presently amount to some 12,000 drawings, around 100,000 prints and some 80,000 photographs, with an emphasis on Dutch art. Amongst the drawings and prints you will find works by famous Dutch artists like Goltzius , Visscher, Rembrandt , Troost, Maris, Toorop , and Veldhoen, but prominent artists from other European Schools, like Hogarth , Callot , Canaletto , and Dürer are also present with specimens up to 1900. The photography collection spreads from its earliest history to

4000-643: The Special Collections held by the University library" through outreach activities directed towards academic and non-academic audiences. Scaliger professors: Furthermore, an internationally prominent scholar is frequently appointed as 'Visiting Scaliger Professor' who delivers i.a. the Scaliger Lecture: Anthony Grafton (2009), François Déroche (2010), Peter Frankopan (2017), Ted Underwood  [ ca ] (2019). The institute

4100-471: The Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader. Proper names continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion. The first inscribed tablets were purely pictographic, which makes it technically difficult to know in which language they were written. Different languages have been proposed, though usually Sumerian is assumed. Later tablets dating after c.  2900 BC start to use syllabic elements, which clearly show

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4200-510: The Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BC), the script evolved to accommodate the various dialects of Akkadian: Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and

4300-467: The University Library, the libraries of Social and Behavioral Sciences , Law, Mathematics and Natural Sciences and the East Asian Library. The collections of the former Archeology , Art History and Kern libraries are available at the University Library. On 3 September 2012, a Library Learning Centre was opened on the university's The Hague campus. Leiden University Libraries took over in 2013

4400-619: The archive of Youssouf Kamal's Monumenta Cartographica Africae et Aegypti . From its very onset the study of the Orient was of vital importance to the new university. Theologians studied the Semitic languages to perceive the meaning of the Bible. Political and commercial interests prompted the new-born Dutch Republic to establish relations with its enemies' enemies, among whom the Ottoman Empire , then at

4500-591: The basis of the DBNL – the digital online library of the Dutch Language, an initiative for an online open access archive of the greatest works in Dutch literary history. The society had regular meetings in Leiden on literary subjects, but also on scientific subjects. It became fashionable for the elite to become members, and many were also members of the Dutch Society of Science ( Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen ),

4600-580: The beginning of the Common Era . Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions ( Latin : cuneus ) which form their signs . Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq ). Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from

4700-414: The beginning, similar-sounding words such as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti] were written with the same symbol (𒋾). As a result, many signs gradually changed from being logograms to also functioning as syllabograms , so that for example, the sign for the word "arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti". Syllabograms were used in Sumerian writing especially to express grammatical elements, and their use

4800-523: The catalogue coincided with the opening of the new library on the upper floor of the Faliede Bagijnkerk (now Rapenburg 70) next to the Theatrum Anatomicum . In 1864 the copy for the complete alphabetical catalogue of the library in Leiden from 1575 to 1860 was finished; it was never to appear in print. Readers were able to consult alphabetical and systematic registers of the Leiden library in

4900-422: The collection was moved from NINO to Leiden University Library. The Scaliger Institute , founded in 2000, aims to stimulate and facilitate the use of the special collections in both teaching and research. For this purpose, the institute offers favourable working conditions and expertise, organizes lectures, symposia, master classes, and special courses, and provides fellowships to junior and senior scholars from

5000-501: The collection was obtained as a bequest from J.T. Bodel Nijenhuis. The lawyer Johannes Tiberius Bodel Nijenhuis (1797–1872), director of the publishing house Luchtmans, for 25 years a member of the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde , was a passionate collector of cartographical and topographical material. The collection contains 60,000 maps (of which 3,000 drawings), 1,500 atlases, 24,000 topographical prints, 1,600 drawings and

5100-586: The colonial collections including the entire map collections (colonial and modern) of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) and in 2014 the complete collection of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). By bringing these collections together with those of the university libraries, the largest Indonesian and Caribbean collections worldwide were created. Furthermore, Leiden University Libraries took over

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5200-623: The complete information chain. The library facilitates not only access to (published) information but increasingly supports the evaluation, use, production and dissemination of scholarly information. To accomplish this the library's activities range from supporting education in information literacy to serving as an expert center for digital publishing . The library aims to function as the scholarly information manager of Leiden University. The strategic plan Partner in Kennis (Partner in Knowledge) focuses on

5300-431: The compound IGI.A (𒅆𒀀) – "eye" + "water" – has the reading imhur , meaning "foam"). Several symbols had too many meanings to permit clarity. Therefore, symbols were put together to indicate both the sound and the meaning of a symbol. For instance, the word 'raven' (UGA) had the same logogram (𒉀) as the word 'soap' (NAGA), the name of a city (EREŠ), and the patron goddess of Eresh (NISABA). To disambiguate and identify

5400-596: The core of the present-day Oriental Collections. In 1659 following the death of the Ottoman bibliophile-encyclopedist Kâtip Çelebi his library was sold. At the time it was the largest private library in Istanbul, and Warner acquired part of it for the University of Leiden. The Oriental Collections nowadays contain 30,000 manuscripts and 200,000 printed books on subjects ranging from Archaeology to Zoroastrianism and in languages from Arabic to Zulu . The Bibliotheca Thysiana

5500-634: The course of four centuries the collection has been expanded through bequests, gifts and acquisitions of collections from scholars. Furthermore, the University Library obtained the deposit right for a copy of each book for which the States of Holland had given the privilege to print. The collection also includes more than 100,000 printed works from the library of the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde which has been deposited on permanent loan since 1876. The Bodel Nijenhuis Collection contains mainly old maps, atlases, topographical prints and drawings. Most of

5600-447: The cuneiform logo-syllabary proper. The latest known cuneiform tablet dates to 75 AD. Cuneiform was rediscovered in modern times in the early 17th century with the publication of the trilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions at Persepolis ; these were first deciphered in the early 19th century. The modern study of cuneiform belongs to the ambiguously named field of Assyriology , as the earliest excavations of cuneiform libraries – in

5700-508: The decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform in 1836. The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times were copied from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions in the ruins of Persepolis , with the first complete and accurate copy being published in 1778 by Carsten Niebuhr . Niebuhr's publication was used by Grotefend in 1802 to make the first breakthrough – the realization that Niebuhr had published three different languages side by side and

5800-545: The development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the suggestion the former influenced the latter. But given the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Others have held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy" and that "a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt..." Early cuneiform inscriptions were made by using

5900-529: The development of the collection changed quite drastically. In 2013 the library of the Royal Tropical Institute was closed and the part of the collection that dealt with the former Dutch colonies was housed at Leiden University Libraries. The KITLV was founded in 1851 and created the foremost collections on Southeast Asia (especially on Indonesia ) and the Caribbean (especially Suriname , Aruba and

6000-446: The early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC. Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by modern scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to

6100-423: The first systematic attempt to develop a corps of influential friends, patrons, and benefactors throughout the world, the first 'universal' library, the list goes on and on – and underpinning it all is a humanistic approach to education and discovery that has figured prominently throughout its history, along with an unbending belief in the limitless potential of human inquiry." Leiden University Libraries focuses on

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6200-452: The form of bound catalogue cards, known as Leidse boekjes . This remained the cataloguing system for the library until 1988. The 22nd Librarian of Leiden University, Johan Remmet de Groot took the initiative for the Dutch library automation endeavor PICA ( Project Integrated Catalogue Automation ). Pica was started up in 1969 and was bought by OCLC in 2000. The first automation project in Leiden started in 1976, produced 400,000 titles via

6300-581: The founding of the university in 1575 there have been 25 Librarians of Leiden University: 1587–1595 : Academiegebouw  [ nl ] , Rapenburg 73, Leiden. 1595–1983 : Faliede Bagijnkerk, Old University Library, now: University Board, Rapenburg 70, Leiden. Leiden University Libraries participates as a member in: Leiden University Libraries creates programmes about different topics highlighting its rich collections. These programmes are mostly in Dutch. Leiden University Libraries regularly organizes extensive exhibitions in collaboration with museums. In

6400-413: The influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia". There are many instances of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations at the time of the invention of writing, and standard reconstructions of the development of writing generally place the development of the Sumerian proto-cuneiform script before

6500-535: The largest collection of its kind in The Netherlands. The collection was brought together in the 1920s and ‘30s by F.M.Th. de Liagre Böhl , Professor of Assyriology at Leiden University and Co-Director of NINO 1939-1955. Diverse text genres are present in the tablet collection: literary texts, omens , incantations , archival texts etc. In addition to the tablets, the collection includes a smaller number of seals , bullae , terracottas and other objects. In 2024

6600-562: The largest collections worldwide on Indonesia and the Caribbean . Furthermore, Leiden University Libraries is the only heritage organization in The Netherlands with five registrations of documents in UNESCO 's international Memory of the World Register . The 16th-century Dutch Revolt against the Habsburgs created a new country with a new religion. Soon, the need for a seat of higher learning

6700-551: The library in December 2007, in March 2008 the completely renovated Special Collections Reading Room Dousa was reopened, in June 2008 the fire protection systems installed in the closed stacks and the vaults of the library were taken into use, in December 2008 library patrons were able to make use of the new facilities created in the renovated Information Centre Huygens , and a new exhibition space

6800-664: The library of Leiden University. Oriental Studies are still flourishing at Leiden University, and the Oriental Collections are still growing to serve the needs of the national and international scholarly community. The Oriental Collections of Leiden University Libraries are known as the Legatum Warnerianum (Warner's Legacy), referring to Levinus Warner (1619–1665), envoy to the Sublime Porte at Constantinople , whose collection of 1,000 Middle Eastern manuscripts forms

6900-499: The library's Catalogue and Digital Collections environment. The library supports researchers from Leiden University through its Centre for Digital Scholarship which focuses on open access , copyright , data management , text and data mining and virtual research environments . The library makes all doctoral dissertations available online through the Catalogue and Leiden University Scholarly Publications that functions according to

7000-407: The ligature KAxGUR 7 consists of 31 strokes. Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary , together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears

7100-443: The meaning and the other the pronunciation (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' was combined with the sign 𒉣 nun 'prince' to express the word 𒅻 nundum , meaning 'lip', formally KA×NUN; cf. Chinese phono-semantic compounds ). Another way of expressing words that had no sign of their own was by so-called 'Diri compounds' – sign sequences that have, in combination, a reading different from the sum of the individual constituent signs (for example,

7200-560: The mid-19th century – were in the area of ancient Assyria . An estimated half a million tablets are held in museums across the world, but comparatively few of these are published . The largest collections belong to the British Museum ( approx. 130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection ( approx. 40,000 tablets), and Penn Museum . Writing began after pottery

7300-463: The near eastern token system used for accounting. The meaning and usage of these tokens is still a matter of debate. These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even late in the 2nd millennium BC. Early tokens with pictographic shapes of animals, associated with numbers, were discovered in Tell Brak , and date to the mid-4th millennium BC. It has been suggested that

7400-470: The ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual Behistun inscriptions , commissioned by the Achaemenid kings. The inscriptions, similar to that of the Rosetta Stone 's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was Old Persian , which was deciphered in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend . The second, Babylonian cuneiform, was deciphered shortly after

7500-459: The past period the following exhibitions have been realized: Furthermore, Leiden University Libraries often serves as lender to exhibitions by major museums in The Netherlands and abroad. Cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo - syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East . The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until

7600-524: The period of late Humanism . The collection contains about 2,500 books and thousands of pamphlets in all scientific fields. Otherwise known as the MNL, the " Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde " (Dutch Society of Letters) was founded in Leiden in 1766 to promote the study of Dutch historical linguistic subjects. This society joined the Leiden University Libraries in 1876, and since 1999 forms

7700-585: The predecessor of the museum: the department of 'Trade and Colonies' founded in 1777 and part of the Hollandsche Maatschappij van Wetenschappen. In 1913 the collection was taken over by the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam founded in 1910. In 1950, after the Dutch decolonization, the mission of the Colonial Institute changed which was reflected in a name change to Royal Tropical Institute . But also

7800-524: The present day and boasts examples of virtually every Dutch photographer, from anonymous nineteenth-century pioneers through Piet Zwart and Paul Citroen to Ed van der Elsken and Johan van der Keuken , including a lot of attention to present day photographers such as Erwin Olaf and Hendrik Kerstens. The collection was started in 1864 with the opening of the Colonial Museum in Haarlem, but parts date back to

7900-449: The relative position of the stylus to the tablet, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. For numbers, a round-tipped stylus was initially used, until the wedge-tipped stylus was generalized. The direction of writing was from top-to-bottom and right-to-left. Cuneiform clay tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so provide a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled if permanence

8000-415: The syllable [ɡu] had fourteen different symbols. The inventory of signs was expanded by the combination of existing signs into compound signs. They could either derive their meaning from a combination of the meanings of both original signs (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' and 𒀀 a 'water' were combined to form the sign for 𒅘 nag̃ 'drink', formally KA×A; cf. Chinese compound ideographs ), or one sign could suggest

8100-438: The teeming collection of extraordinary materials it has scrupulously gathered and maintained over a sustained period of time, but most of all for being the world's first scholarly library in a truly modern sense. The litany of 'firsts' recorded at Leiden is dazzling – the first printed catalogue to be prepared by an institution of its holdings, the first attempt to identify and maintain what today are known as 'special collections,'

8200-472: The third century AD. The complexity of cuneiforms prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian cuneiform was developed with an independent and unrelated set of simple cuneiform characters, by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. Most scholars consider this writing system to be an independent invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at

8300-432: The time, such as Elamite , Akkadian, Hurrian , and Hittite cuneiforms. It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" ( 𐏎 ), "king" ( 𐏋 ) or "country" ( 𐏌 ). This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script (36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms), was specially designed and used by

8400-652: The token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first unequivocal written documents start with the Uruk IV period, from circa 3,300 BC, followed by tablets found in Uruk III, Jemdet Nasr , Early Dynastic I Ur and Susa (in Proto-Elamite ) dating to the period until circa 2,900 BC. Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with

8500-876: The transformation of the library to an expert centre supporting research and education in digital spaces through Virtual Research Environments and Datalabs, the realization of library learning centres, the development of new expert areas such as data curation and text & data mining , and on digital information skills. Leiden's Catalogue makes available a considerable array of digital scholarly information: more than 400 databases , >70,000 e-journals, >5,000 newspapers and newsmagazines, >1,000,000 e-books and reference works, many hundreds of millions of journal articles, its digital special collections and repository materials. These digital information resources are available worldwide to Leiden University students and staff. The special collections and archives of Leiden University (see below) are increasingly made available through

8600-585: The two languages are related, their writing systems seem to have been developed separately. For Hurrian, there were even different systems in different polities (in Mitanni , in Mari , in the Hittite Empire). The Hurrian orthographies were generally characterised by more extensive use of syllabograms and more limited use of logograms than Akkadian. Urartian, in comparison, retained a more significant role for logograms. In

8700-565: The word more precisely, two phonetic complements were added – Ú (𒌑) for the syllable [u] in front of the symbol and GA (𒂵) for the syllable [ga] behind. Finally, the symbol for 'bird', MUŠEN (𒄷) was added to ensure proper interpretation. As a result, the whole word could be spelt 𒌑𒉀𒂵𒄷, i.e. Ú.NAGA.GA (among the many variant spellings that the word could have). For unknown reasons, cuneiform pictographs, until then written vertically, were rotated 90° counterclockwise, in effect putting them on their side. This change first occurred slightly before

8800-588: The zenith of its power. In the course of its expansionist policy the Dutch Republic secured possession of the Indonesian archipelago and other territories in South East Asia. In Japan, Dutch merchants maintained a trading post to the exclusion of all other European powers. In the course of four centuries countless manuscripts, printed books and photographs on the Orient and Oriental Studies have found their way to

8900-561: Was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings, also known as Akkadograms, was added to the script, in addition to the Sumerian logograms, or Sumerograms, which were already inherent in the Akkadian writing system and which Hittite also kept. Thus the pronunciations of many Hittite words which were conventionally written by logograms are now unknown. The Hurrian language (attested 2300–1000 BC) and Urartian language (attested 9th–6th century BC) were also written in adapted versions of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Although

9000-484: Was erected in 1655 to house the book collection of the lawyer Joannes Thysius (1622–1653). Upon his early death, he left a legacy of 20,000 guilders for the building of a public library ("tot publycque dienst der studie") with a custodian's dwelling. Designed by the architect Arent van 's-Gravensande, the building follows the Dutch Classical style and is regarded as one of the jewels of Dutch 17th century architecture. It

9100-490: Was felt and in 1575 Leiden University was founded with the spoils from a confiscated Catholic monastery nearby. At the time the university was founded, it was immediately determined that a library in the vicinity of lecture halls was an absolute necessity. The library's first book was the Polyglot Bible , printed by Christoffel Plantijn , a gift of William of Orange to the library in 1575. The presentation of this book

9200-414: Was further damaged by the librarian, Willem George Pluygers, who in 1864 applied reagents to the text in an attempt to make it more legible. The West Saxon aristocrat, monk, scholar, and poet Aldhelm (c. 639–709) composed, among many other works, a set of one hundred hexametrical ' enigmata ' or 'enigmas', inspired by the so-called Riddles of Symphosius . The thirty-third was Lorica ('corselet'). This

9300-406: Was further developed and modified in the writing of the Akkadian language to express its sounds. Often, words that had a similar meaning but very different sounds were written with the same symbol. For instance the Sumerian words 'tooth' [zu], 'mouth' [ka] and 'voice' [gu] were all written with the original pictogram for mouth (𒅗). Words that sounded alike would have different signs; for instance,

9400-448: Was in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to the second century AD. The latest firmly dateable tablet, from Uruk, dates to 79/80 AD. Ultimately, it was completely replaced by alphabetic writing , in the general sense, in the course of the Roman era , and there are no cuneiform systems in current use. It had to be deciphered as

9500-478: Was invented, during the Neolithic , when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. In recent years a contrarian view has arisen on the tokens being the precursor of writing. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes ( clay bullae ) and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with

9600-447: Was named after Josephus Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), Leiden's most renowned scholar during the early years of its existence and a great benefactor of the University Library through the donation, at his death, of his exceptional collection of manuscripts and all his oriental books. In the prestigious UNESCO Memory of the World Register documents are inscribed that affirm their world significance and outstanding universal value. Since

9700-451: Was not needed. Most surviving cuneiform tablets were of the latter kind, accidentally preserved when fires destroyed the tablets' storage place and effectively baked them, unintentionally ensuring their longevity. The script was widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected. The spoken language included many homophones and near-homophones, and in

9800-402: Was opened on 25 March 2010, in the direct vicinity of a completely renovated entrance. In 2012–2013 the study areas (the complete first floor and parts of the second floor) of the University Library were renovated and a media centre was opened. Since 1 June 2009, the Leiden libraries form one organization: Leiden University Libraries (UBL) . Leiden University Libraries has a number of locations:

9900-406: Was retained, but was now pronounced immerum , rather than the Sumerian udu . Such retained individual signs or, sometimes, entire sign combinations with logographic value are known as Sumerograms , a type of heterogram . The East Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by

10000-601: Was translated into Old English, and first witnessed in the Northumbrian dialect of Old English as the Leiden Riddle; the language is of the seventh or eighth century. Unusually, the riddle is also attested, in West Saxon , among the Old English riddles of the later tenth-century Exeter Book , where it is number 33 or 35 (depending on the edition consulted). Apart from differences in language caused by dialect and date, and damage to

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